Police stops were more common in Chicago last summer than they were at the height of New York City’s controversial “stop-and-frisk” practices in 2011, according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

[…]

This data may even understate the number of stops in Chicago, since police in the Windy City only recorded stops that didn’t lead to arrests or tickets. But the data also doesn’t show how many stops resulted in frisks, so not all the stops were necessarily like New York City’s stop-and-frisk searches, which drew national attention for their disproportionate use against black New Yorkers.

Black Chicagoans were similarly much more likely to be victims of the stops, according to the report. Although black residents make up nearly 33 percent of the city’s population, they accounted for 72 percent of stops. These disparities were more pronounced in white neighborhoods like Jefferson Park, where black Americans were more than 21 times as likely as their white counterparts to be stopped, after accounting for the neighborhood’s white and black populations.

But NYPD supporters who ignore all that ails the Department and that there are bad officers in their midst, will try everything to link the killer to the protests. The PBA’s Pat Lynch and others will try and blame the Mayor for the killings, claiming that the Mayor doesn’t support the officers wholeheartedly and without reservations.

The problem is that there’s no truth to the matter asserted. The Mayor does support the police. He also doesn’t want anyone to tolerate criminal behavior by the police. He wants justice applied evenly and fairly. He has to warn his son (who is black) that police might not respect him or treat him properly because of the color of his skin, even if he does nothing wrong. That’s not disrespecting the police; that’s stating an objective fact. Police in NYC, and nationally, do engage in racial profiling and they do stop blacks far more often than whites when adjusting for per capita.

Justice. Only Justice Shall Thou Pursue. It’s originally found in the Old Testament. It’s a call for justice and to follow the law.

It’s not just an empty slogan.

I’ve been referring to this belief quite frequently in the past several months, if only because it’s become abundantly clear that there are some people who don’t think that justice applies to everyone.

Some people believe that law enforcement is immune from being responsible for their actions that result in the death of unarmed people and particularly unarmed black men and children. This belief extends to the police and prosecutors who are supposed to uphold the law.

When the police and prosecutors fail to do their jobs properly, that harms everyone - it’s a breach of the social compact that the police have with us. And they have to be responsible for their actions as well.

It’s pitiful that the police boosters are trying to pin blame on people like Al Sharpton or Mayor DeBlasio for the shooting of the two cops; we don’t hear these same voices blaming right wingers like Rush or Hannity when white supremacists and sovereign citizens use the same rhetoric and vitriol in stalking and targeting law enforcement. There, those people are categorized as lone wolfs and not representative of everyone else.

Personal responsibility.

It cuts both ways. It is ultimately the responsibility of the shooters and criminals who carry out these acts. It is also the responsibility for everyone to call out those who use extreme rhetoric.

Justice demands it.

The need to seek justice for those who are killed at the hands of police is not mutually exclusive with the need respect or to mourn their losses in such horrible circumstances. The NYPD has done heroic things, such as running into the burning WTC before it came crashing down on 9/11, and they’ve killed unarmed black men including Sean Bell, Eric Garner, and Amadou Diallo. They’ve sodomized Abner Louima, and the fight for justice continues. Good cops shouldn’t stand to see their ranks sullied by those who violate the social compact, and yet that’s exactly the message we get from their union leadership who blames the assassination on the mayor who represents an entire city, and not just a police union.

Let me repeat this: an undercover cop repeatedly sucker punches a 12-year old for resisting arrest while other cops are trying to cuff the kid. It’s the undercover cop who comes in out of nowhere as other uniformed cops are handling the kid. According to Think Progress:

In the video, the boy, who is identified as 12 years, and his friend repeatedly ask why they’re being arrested, as onlookers yell at the officers. According to an actress who uploaded the video to Facebook, Sarah Doneghy, the two were approached by police for allegedly pushing down a classmate. In the video, the boys are held against two separate vehicles for several minutes before they’re put in the cars in handcuffs.

“This is not a war, this is a 12-year-old kid,” said one woman who identified herself as a lawyer. “They’re animals right?”

The classmate allegedly said that the two boys were not the perpetrators. Officers allege the victims were actually 16 and 17-years-old, and that they were participating in a gang initiation.

The video alone should be a firing offense. Period. I’ve got zero tolerance for this kind of crap, and I can’t wait to listen to the PBA claim that this was somehow justified or that the cop was acting according to proper procedures, even though the video shows the absolute opposite. There was no justification for the punches. None.

Even if the arrest of the two kids were justified, there’s absolutely no justification for the assault by the cop. That’s what is going on here. We’re witnessing an assault by the cop on a 12-year old.

UPDATE at 12/20/14 8:54:14 am by lawhawk

#NYPD undercover cop suspended after being caught on video sucker punching teen being arrested by other officers http://t.co/Ljo59QNUyk

So, the other night, there were graduate seminary students in New York City who were out protesting the failure to indict anyone over the death of #EricGarner. The students agreed that they would engage in nonviolent demonstrations and civil disobedience. They locked arms.

Two of those were Shawn Torres, 23, and Benjamin Perry, 24, both graduate students at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. They took part in rolling demonstrations Friday night, as a cold, soaking rain swept across the city. At the end of the evening, they briefly blockaded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive near Delancey Street and both were arrested, as they expected to be.

But Mr. Perry, a white man, and Mr. Torres, a black man, say what happened to them showed disparate treatment in subtle and stark ways. The president of the seminary has written to Mayor Bill de Blasio to suggest that the experiences of the students were “an object lesson” for retraining officers; the Police Department said it would have to review the details of the matter.

Standing on the road with arms linked just after 11 p.m., they heard a police sergeant’s final warning but had already decided they would disobey.

“We were peacefully offering ourselves up,” Mr. Perry said.

“Two officers grabbed me,” Mr. Torres said, and cuffed him with the plastic ties. “In the process, one of them ended up pushing Ben away. This is when the difference comes in.”

“I put my hands behind my head, waiting,” Mr. Perry said. “Another officer grabbed me and threw me face first on the ground. He put his head next to my ears and whispered, ‘Just get out of here.’ “

Mr. Torres, meanwhile, had been deposited in the back of a police van. “I was the first one,” he said.

Mr. Perry climbed to his feet. “I was bewildered, but I wasn’t going to leave Shawn,” he said. “I just stood there and waited. In 15 to 20 seconds, another officer saw me looking around. He cuffed me, but he didn’t want to process me. He took me around to other cops, saying, ‘Do you want to take this guy? I don’t want to be out that late.’ He was shopping me around.” Eventually he found an officer to escort Mr. Perry.

Racism is alive and well. The NYPD is investigating. There’s no reason to doubt the reporting or the claims by the two students. It’s a clear sign that police take a different position on how they interact with people, even when they’re doing the same thing right alongside each other.

lawhawkre: #1 BishopX Yup. This incident highlights the disparate treatment of blacks versus whites when they interact with law enforcement. From how the two men were treated at the scene of the protest to how they were treated once both ...

People make poor driving decisions all the time in New York City, and occasionally the NYPD will be on hand to issue a summons. Yesterday morning, they started off thinking that it would be another routine traffic stop.

It wasn’t.

While driving in the Village, the driver made an illegal turn north onto Seventh Avenue, which runs in the opposite direction. The responding officers stopped the vehicle, a rental car driven by Victor Greer of Reading, PA, and then noticed two knives in the driver’s seat. Looking further, several boxes of ammo were found. A magazine was found locked on the floor with another 20 rounds.

Then, examining the trunk, two AR-15 rifles, a shotgun, and a handgun were found, along with a note.

It’s the note that is truly disturbing and makes you wonder what this guy was intending to do.

The note:

“I want to die in combat, so I can go to heaven and meet God.”

At the moment, Greer is facing multiple weapons charges.

The Daily News found that he has prior arrests for firearms possession and reckless driving in Pennsylvania, along with a prior arrest in Florida for an altercation with law enforcement. Yet, his mother thinks that he was never violent according to local Pennsylvania news reports that interviewed her yesterday. His mother also indicated that he appeared to be suffering from depression and stays in his room for days after being out of work for two years.

This guy was up to no good, may be suffering from mental illness, and yet here he was in New York with multiple firearms with a note suggesting he was intent on doing harm to others.

The most likely explanation for his behavior may be that he may have been thinking of engaging in suicide by cop, though the fact that he was arrested without further incident suggests he was conflicted over doing so. Either way, he’s going to need serious mental health assistance.

It also once again highlights the easy and ready access to high powered firearms without much effort to keep these weapons out of the hands of those who are mentally ill, who have prior arrests, etc.

Under the blaring headline “Sterling Connects Codes From The Dark Knight Rises (TDKR) to Obama Telling the World that His Number One Fear for the National Security of the United States of America is a Nuclear Bomb Hitting Manhattan, New York City, New York (TDKR = Gotham),” Sterling include an Alex Jones “false flag” videos and claims she has decoded messages from the Christopher Nolan superhero film to indicate some kind of impending nuclear war(?).

Further on down the site’s vertical, there’s a confusing essay about how Karate Kid foretold the terrorist attacks of 9/11

She seems to have taken down much of what Andrew found at her site - but I did find this ‘chemical’ trutherism:

Chemical Spraying in Kentucky Skies
Why is it so bad that chemicals are being sprayed in the skies of Kentucky? Well, hummmm, let me think about that one! Maybe because you’re conditioning the citizens of Kentucky to not being concerned when they are being sprayed with chemicals that they have no clue what the hell is in them!

Ok, calm down Shawna4Freedom :) You’re an educated woman, you got two bachelors, one masters, are working on a doctorate and hell, you even did an internship at NASA recently, so you should have enough sense to know that the chemicals being sprayed in the skies of Kentucky are just innocent little, well, hell, I don’t know what they are, uuuuu, but, hummm, you don’t need to worry about them, because if they were dangerous, someone would tell us, right?
Let me ask you this question, you guys, would an enemy tell you that they are trying to kill you?

Why are citizens of Kentucky being conditioned to trust numerous jets in their skies spraying chemicals on them, their children, their livestock, their land and their homes?

Why is there a litmus test being used on our military to get those who refuse to fire on American citizens out of the military?

Why are they firing our generals?

How can we know that some enemy of the United States of America or of Kentucky, is not thinking that the day will come that they will be able to spray the citizens with chemicals that will kill them whether it be a fast or slow kill, or make them so sick that they are begging for Obamacare or for federal help?

Why are Americans dying of cancer more than any other time in our history?

Is it really worth it to put chemicals in our skies? I will push to get the chemicals out!

hopefully, whatever she is smoking is pot, and not bathsalts, which are chemicals- right?

Harold Charles “Hal” Turner (born March 15, 1962) is an American white nationalist, Holocaust denier[1] and blogger from North Bergen, New Jersey. In August 2010, he was convicted for making threats against three federal judges with the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Prior to Turner’s arrest, his radio program, The Hal Turner Show, was a webcast from his home once a week.

The Nation’s Max Blumenthal details their relationship:

Turner was once a prominent activist in New Jersey’s Republican Party. To area conservatives, he was best known by his moniker for call-ins to the Sean Hannity Show, “Hal from North Bergen.” For years, Hannity offered his top-rated radio show as a regular forum for Turner’s occasionally racist, always over-the-top rants. Hannity also chatted with him off-air, allegedly offering encouragement to Turner as he struggled to overcome a cocaine habit and homosexual leanings. Turner has boasted that Hannity once invited Turner and his son on to the set of Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes. Today, Turner lurks on the fringes of the far right, spouting hate-laced tirades on his webcast radio show. Hannity, meanwhile, remains mum about his former alliance with the neo-Nazi, homing in instead on the supposed racism of black and Latino Democrats.

I was quite disappointed when Sean Hannity at first tried to say he didn’t know me and then went on to say that I ran some senate campaign in New Jersey. In fact, Sean Hannity does know me and we were quite friendly a number of years ago.
…When Hannity took over Bob Grant’s spot on 77 WABC in New York City, I was a well-known, regular and welcome caller to his show. Through those calls, Sean and I got to know each other a bit and at some point, I can’t remember exactly when, Sean gave me the secret “Guest call-in number” at WABC so that my calls could always get on the air.

When I utlized that call-in number, Sean would very often come onto that line during commercial breaks so we could chat before I went on the air. Our off-the-air chats grew to an exchange of other phone numbers, me giving Sean my home and cellular number and Sean giving me his direct dial-in number at Fox News channel.

In 1993, My wife got pregnant and around a month later, Sean reported that he and his wife were expecting their first child. We got to talking about things expectant dads talk about and the relationship grew.

…Over the course of the next three or four years, Sean and I spoke regularly off the air about our kids, politics and news of the day. My on-air calls to his show remained regular and welcome

Stay tuned to this moonbat channel for next weeks episode when we get to mention George Zimmerman, John Derbyshire, and Pat Robertson.

sure to be fun for all…

UPDATE at 4/24/14 12:45:12 pm

Our very adroit Commodore pointed out he also gave an exhorbitant amount of expensive air time to Dog, the bounty hunter after he also was recorded hating on those with more pigment:

First, the good:Video
The CNN video gives a good rundown of the saga of the “Journeyman Hacker”: a 23-year-old startup guy, Patrick McConlogue, noticed a homeless man, Leo Grand, benching chains—not a typical activity for the homeless in NYC. Intrigued and empathetic, McConlogue wrote this post on Medium (“Finding the unjustly homeless, and teaching them to code.”) wherein he outlined his plan to offer this man (he didn’t yet know Leo’s name) a leg up:

The idea is simple. Without disrespecting him, I will offer two options:

I will come back tomorrow and give you $100 in cash.

I will come back tomorrow and give you three JavaScript books, (beginner-advanced-expert) and a super cheap basic laptop. I will then come an hour early from work each day--when he feels prepared--and teach him to code.

This generated more than a little backlash from all corners of the Web…

… but it worked. Leo Grand chose the computer, and has now coded up a carpooling app aimed at reducing CO2 emissions in New York City. Some time later (as reported in the video) police arrested him for sleeping on a bench, and took his laptop as evidence. Fortunately another tech-angel (a Google employee who had been following the story) decided to take up the cause and donated a computer to him.

For what started out as a well-intentioned but vaguely condescending and tone-deaf Medium post, the story is, I think, a happy one. Hopefully Grand will continue to find success.

Greg Gopman, and his company, AngelHack, offer no apparent utility or value to our planet. It’s a startup that begets other startups, a hackathon for hackathons, an engorged, vomiting ouroboros in reverse. His pride orbits around organizing the “largest hackathons” in history—and given that a hackathon doesn’t mean much of anything, that’s about as weighty as telling the world’s longest knock knock joke, or blowing a trillion soap bubbles.

But Gopman thinks he’s earned some sort of high social spot, from which he can type out horrid Facebook updates like this one:

Just got back to SF. I’ve traveled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down market st in San Francisco. Why the heart of our city has to be overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash I have no clue. Each time I pass it my love affair with SF dies a little.

And I thought the “neo-reactionary” king-for-a-day dudebros were the bottom of the barrel. I’ll take a hundred privileged-but-willing-to-make-a-difference guys like McConlogue over even half a Gopman any day.

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal appeals court refused Friday to toss out court rulings finding that New York City carried out its police stop-and-frisk policy in a discriminatory manner, ending what was likely the city’s last chance to nullify the decisions before the arrival of a new mayor who has criticized the tactic.

A three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a five-page order Friday, saying the city could make its arguments to toss out the rulings when its appeal of the decisions of U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin is heard next year.

Last month, the same appeals panel had suspended the effects of Scheindlin’s rulings and removed her from the case, saying she misapplied a related ruling that allowed her to take the stop-and-frisk case and made comments to the media during a trial that called her impartiality into question.

The city had argued that the panel’s decision to remove Scheindlin meant it should also nullify her rulings.

I thought this was an interesting take on what is, or rather might be, in store for New York City. I can’t comment on how accurate the portrayal of the people involved is because it’s been several years since I lived in NYC, but it looks like there are about to be some major changes in the way the city is run.

Tuesday, voters in America’s most prominent city are poised to elect Bill de Blasio mayor and turn over every major lever of municipal government to a new breed of politics that’s been on the rise but never close to this level of power: a mix of young progressives, reconstituted ’60s- and ’70s-era lefties, newly active minority voters and deep-pocketed unions that have transformed themselves into expert campaign organizers.

What that will mean as they try to translate that ideology into a governing philosophy is a question that even people who’ve been leading the charge are still asking. And in New York, where there are more than 8 million residents (plus close to a million more who come in daily for work), 300,000 city employees and a $70 billion-plus budget, there’s a lot riding on the answer.

These are the people who formed the labor-funded, liberal-favorite Working Families Party and sparked Occupy Wall Street. They say government shouldn’t just allow for change — it should force new change on the city and private sector. That means universal pre-K; closed tax loopholes; pensions divested from fossil fuel companies; family-friendlier work policies, including financial support for single parents; and paid sick leave requirements. And on the housing front: more market regulation, leveraging of privately owned real estate that’s in trouble and greater community power over developers’ plans.

The reaction of the city’s business, real estate, finance and high-tech industry leaders to its new governing class-in-waiting has ranged from panic to scoffing at the stuff they say pipe dreams are made of. The political establishment in the city is skeptical any of it can work, especially without igniting a budget disaster. And the progressives in charge are superstitious enough that, despite their candidates’ long and overwhelming lead in the polls, they’ve avoided doing too much planning before election night. […]

CuriousLurkerre: #1 Political Atheist Agreed. They need to avoid ending up becoming the left's version of the Tea Party. The NYC political machine is an old & large one that tends to be rife with corruption--I can't even begin to ...

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From Sen. Schumer's Facebook page: There are two simple reasons the comparison does not hold water. First, the federal RFRA was written narrowly to protect individuals' religious freedom from government interference unless the government or state had a compelling interest. ...

UPDATE MARCH 30: NEW TIME FOR LIVE STREAM - 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will be flying a rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space from the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on ...

What's this? Another article on Cracked about how incorrigibly tribal-minded us homo sapiens are? Well, yes. But the proverbial devil is in the proverbial details. Proverbially. It's still worth reading. That's what I'm getting at. Everyone is talking about Scientology ...

China attacks the biggest code repository in the world. After battling a distributed denial of service attack for four days, GitHub on Monday was able to restore normal service levels. The primary target of the assault is greatfire.org, which is ...

An American woman--presumably not Muslim, though she doesn't say one way or the other--married to a Libyan man is taken aback when her 9-year-old daughter suddenly wants to start wearing hijab. This is the story of how conflicted she felt ...

NEW YORK, March 27 (Reuters) - Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, ...

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a new challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare law that took aim at a bureaucratic board labeled by some Republicans as a ...

Depending on the outcome of a hearing scheduled for Monday, a 33-year-old Indiana woman could face up to 70 years in prison for what she says was a miscarriage. Reproductive rights advocates say her case is a disturbing example ...

Spence Jackson, the chief spokesman for the late Missouri auditor Tom Schweich, died over the weekend from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Jefferson City police said Monday they responded to a call Sunday evening at Jackson's apartment. They found ...

On Friday, Motherboard reve​aled that fully functioning Uber accounts were for sale on the dark web. Today, it appears that some people have fallen victim to fraudulent trips being made with their login credentials. "It happened this morning," Phil ...

Are conservatives anti-science? Spoiler: Conservatives aren't anti-science or pro-science. But, they are pro-common-sense. And once more scientists adopt common sense approach to science, they'll find that they have the support of conservative politicians - the people whose job it is ...

cracked.com Once the fighting started, a lot of people died, well over a million on our side alone. For the war to continue, a constant stream of new fighters had to join up, and they didn't have the benefit of ...

Here is an interesting article on one of Tail Gunner Joe's sick witch hunts that has, unfortunately, been forgotten. I try not to feel schadenfreude of the fate of McCarthy's side kick, Ray Cohn, but I never succeed.

About the Graphic How should a woman try to get ahead in a male-dominated workplace? Perhaps the answer lies less on women "manning up" and more in how businesses value their employees. Many women confront this tension as they ...

If we accept the idea of Orthopraxy over Orthodoxy, then what does evangelism look like? What is the Witness of those who try to follow the Way of Christ Jesus? To evangelize is to spread the good news that we ...

A short column in The Nation that is a must read. The primary difference between liberalism and conservatism, at least in theory, is that the latter is an ideology and the former isn't. Conservatism, as Milton Friedman argued, posits that ...

This is a powerful admission of culpability and I applaud his courage in making it. It really should be read in its entirety. Glenn Ford should be completely compensated to every extent possible because of the flaws of a system ...

Sarah Vine of the DM gets it wrong: SARAH VINE: Teaching 11-year-olds about rape is a form of child abuse The problem with this country, I've come to realise, is that it treats adults like children and children like adults. ...